Vacuum sterilizers operate by drawing a vacuum within a chamber and exposing articles within the chamber to steam or a vaporized sterilant. Important in the operation of such sterilizers is maintaining the vacuum within the chamber at desired levels. Most vacuum sterilizers have diagnostic systems that have a leak detection cycle to detect leaks within the system. A problem with existing diagnostic systems is that, although they can detect a vacuum leak within the sterilizer, the diagnostic routine cannot isolate regions or sections of the sterilizer where the leak may exist.
Presently, when a leak is detected, service personnel typically replace parts in certain areas or sections of the sterilizer and rerun the leak detection cycle to determine if the replaced parts corrected the problem. As will be appreciated, such a procedure is very time consuming and not efficient in that a typical leak detection cycle can take approximately forty to forty-five minutes to run. In this respect, the leak detection cycle utilizes a vacuum source (pump or ejector) within a sterilizer to draw a vacuum on the entire system, including the sterilization chamber which comprises the largest volume of the overall system. Moreover, most leak detection cycles are performed under normal operating conditions, namely, by heating the sterilization chamber, which heating is part of a typical sterilization cycle. The heating typically involves bringing the sterilization chamber to a temperature of about 250 degrees Fahrenheit (120 C). Once heated, the sterilization chamber must be allowed to cool before service personnel can work on the system as to avoid personal injury and/or damage to parts of the sterilizer during disconnection while such parts are hot. Thus, the present trial-and-error replacement of parts and repeated running of leak detection cycles to detect a leak can be long, time-consuming and inefficient.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system that allows service personnel to isolate sections of a vacuum sterilizer to quickly detect which section of the sterilizer is leaking.
The present invention provides a leak locating system for isolating sections of piping within a vacuum sterilizer, which detection system can connect such sections to a vacuum source of the steam sterilizer and then detect leaks in the isolated sections.